Gwyneth Paltrow Show Her Crazy Heart in the New Country Strong Trailer

Studios still think audiences want to know the entire story of a movie before they see it. For evidence, just see the trailer for Country Strong, which stars Gwyneth Paltrow as an unstable country star who embarks on a comeback tour organized by her husband/manager (Tim McGraw). Said tour also features a young singer-songwriter (Garrett Hedlund) who Paltrow gets involved with, and a former beauty queen (Leighton Meester) who wants to be taken seriously as an artist.

Is there really much doubt about how this is going to go down? There will be tears, yelling, laughter, hugs, rural landscapes and a whole lotta country music until eventually the characters find and redeem themselves. It will all be capped off with an overblown performance of the title song, which you can glimpse in the trailer.

The wild card here is that writer/director Shana Feste showed a very sure hand directing actors in her previous film, The Greatest. Could Country Strong transcend its formula with emotionally affecting performances like last year's Crazy Heart? It's hard to tell from the trailer, which mostly boils down to a sizzle reel of melodrama and live country music.